| Original caption: “A returned German prisoner of war identified this woman’s son. He will never return because he is dead. Prisoners released by the Soviet Union.” Kurt Huhn (???? – ????) was assigned to 150.Artillerie-Regiment Stab (Staff Headquarters). He was captured in Perleberg in 1945. Herbert Metzler (???? – ????) served with the II.Bataillon, 168.Grenadier-Regiment. Otto Dersch (???? – ????) served with Kranken-Kraftwagen-Zug 457 (“Ambulance Unit 457”). At the Yalta Conference on February 4-11, 1945, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), Prime Minister Winston Churchill (November 30, 1874 – January 24, 1965), and Soviet Premier and Dictator Joseph Stalin (December 18, 1878 – March 5, 1953) discussed postwar plans for Germany. Stalin indicated his desire for Germans to pay reparations in the form of manual labor. Churchill and Roosevelt did not object. After all, NAzi Germany had the Ostarbeiter program, displacing millions of slave laborers from their homelands to Germany for forced labor. Millions of them had died under Nazi rule. In addition, physical and sexual violence was endemic to the Ostarbeiter program. Workers were as young as 12. Stalin proposed German military and civilian women aged 18 to 30 and men aged 16 to 45 be held in the Soviet Union for labor. The Soviet program was supervised by Glavnoye upravleniye po delam voyennoplennykh i internirovannykh Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del (“Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs – NKVD”). Forced labor began in 1944, as the Soviet Red Army encountered populations of Volksdeutsche in Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. By the war’s end, 504,153 German civilians were interned in the Soviet Union; 54,449 had returned home, 85,145 were reported missing, and 46,732 were confirmed dead. Around 2,000,000, 400,000 Nazi German soldaten were captured during the war, and some 400,000 died. These numbers are in heavy dispute. There could be as many as 1,000,000 dead Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union. Most of the surviving internees were returned by 1950. Their journey home was fraught with difficulties, as they were given little food or water and locked in train cars for days. In 1955, West Germany and the Soviet Union began negotiations for mutual recognition. A condition of West Germany reestablishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union was the return of all remaining internees. West German Prime Minister Konrad Adenauer (January 5, 1876 – April 19, 1967) announced to the public it was his top priority. On the invitation of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (April 15, 1894 – September 11, 1971) Adenauer flew with a large diplomatic entourage to Moscow on September 8, 1955, for a week of talks. This resulted in Heimkehr der Zehntausend (“Homecoming of the Ten Thousand”) but the Soviets would not agree to German reunification. In October 1955, the 1st 600 released prisoners arrived at the Friedland transit camp near Göttingen. Shortly thereafter, they were visited by Federal President Theodor Heuss. By the beginning of 1956, what went down in history as the “Homecoming of the Ten Thousand” had been accomplished. It was an achievement that many still consider the most outstanding of Adenauer’s term in office. While the relief and joy of those finally released and their families are hard to describe, the “return of the ten thousand” represents a sad reality for countless others. Germany had actually expected far more returnees, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of those still missing in the Soviet Union are becoming a certainty. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0775.jpg |
| Image Size | 728.20 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2146 x 2892 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | United States Information Agency |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | October 1, 1955 |
| Location | |
| City | Göttingen |
| State or Province | Lower Saxony |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NWDNS-306-PS-55(21266) |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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